Water, Power, Politics, and Preservation in Hetch Hetchy and Yosemite National Park

By John Warfield Simpson

PANTHEON; 356 PAGES; $28.50

Let's get one thing straight. You can't undo the past.

I'm sorry. You can say what you want about the past. You can rewrite it and revise it. You can atone. You can make amends. But it just can't be undone.

So what is there to say about "Dam!," a book that concludes that "it's time to undo the past" by tearing down the O'Shaughnessy Dam, which holds water in Hetch Hetchy Reservoir?

John Warfield Simpson, a professor of landscape architecture and natural resources at Ohio State University, does a serviceable job of retelling the oft-told tale of the inundation of the Edenic Hetch Hetchy Valley by the evil imperial city of San Francisco. That is, it's serviceable if you like to have your prejudices confirmed.

The usual cast of caricatures appears in "Dam!" The epic battle -- portrayed as the origin story of modern environmentalism -- pits the preservationist John Muir against the conservationist Gifford Pinchot. Never mind that a generation of historians, including most recently Robert Righter in "The Battle Over Hetch Hetchy," have labored to examine this story in a more nuanced, knowing fashion. Damn complexity. The myth has a moral.

And there's the rub. While history as morality tale may seem to well serve present political purposes, it actually robs us of the opportunity to understand the past in ways that may be useful as we reconsider Hetch Hetchy. It may be too late for Simpson to profit from considering a few common problems of historical storytelling, but it is not too late for those of us who drink from the waters of Hetch Hetchy to keep them in mind as we ponder its past, present and future.

Unlike the past, history can be undone. In fact, history is nearly always in a state of being undone and recomposed. That is the beauty and the joy and the challenge of writing history. And it is why history will always be with us as a vocation and avocation and passion of the present. Unlike the past, which is, well, past, history is always in the present.

However, this also poses one of the most dangerous temptations in writing history. Historians call it "presentism," that is, interpreting the past through the lens of the present. "We were less mature in our environmental thinking then," writes Simpson of the decision to dam Hetch Hetchy Valley. Who is this "we" that speaks of "our" environmental thinking? Throughout his book, Simpson plays this trick -- a kind of tic, really -- and it's illustrative of a fundamental flaw in his thinking. Unfortunately, it also destroys one of the principal joys of reading history. Things really were different in the past. If we assume that they were not, we miss a lot. And I don't include those long gone in that "we." History is not for them. It is for us.

Of course, Simpson isn't assuming that things were exactly the same. "We were less mature" is a statement about change. However, embedded in this statement is another dangerous assumption, one that plagues much bad history. Historians call this "historicism." It is the assumption that history progresses -- that things get better -- and even if things don't get better, well, "we" mature.

There are three problems with this kind of thinking about history. The first is that progress can be demonstrated only if it is proved in particular, not assumed in general. The second problem is that it assumes that people in the past would have agreed with us if only they had been as enlightened as we are. This unduly glorifies the present as it obscures what is most interesting about the past: why people made the decisions they made.

The third problem with "historicism" is that it's boring. It assumes that the past led to the present in a nice, neat lineage of causation. All we have to do is look to the past to see what caused our current state of affairs. If the only use of history is to explain the inevitability of the present, what's the point?

Historicism assumes that we study history to understand why things turned out the way they did. But the point is, things did not have to turn out the way they did. There were other possibilities in the past. There are other possibilities alive now. By considering the past in all of its complexity, we may, in fact, learn about possibilities we have forgotten. Indeed, this is what keeps many historians busy revising history so that we can remember what historicism would have us forget.

Simpson would like us to reconsider Hetch Hetchy. He is passionate. "Tear it down!" he writes. "Tear down this damn dam-damnation and restore the Hetchy Hetchy Valley. Heal this self-inflicted wound in Yosemite National Park and our national heart and soul. We can do it."

Unfortunately, it seems Simpson was unable to decide whether he was writing history about the past or a polemic about the present. This is not to say that one cannot do both. Indeed, some of the best, most engaging history is an argument aimed at the heart and soul of the present. As Righter shows in his book, the outcome was not inevitable. Instead, it was a result of political miscalculations by Muir and his allies, the contradictions of Progressive politics in the aftermath of the great earthquake and fires of 1906 in a city without water, and the failure of opponents of damming Hetch Hetchy to clearly articulate and organize technical arguments for pursuing other options for San Francisco.

Alas, "Dam!" fails as both history and polemic. Because Simpson assumes that we are more mature in our environmental thinking now, his history and his argument are self-evident. All we have to do is do the right thing. But what is the right thing? This is the same question that confronted San Francisco in 1906. As in the past, there is no easy, self-evident answer today.